Postage meters offer many benefits to postal authorities when compared with postage stamps. If there is a rate change, postage-stamp customers need to be provided with stamps of new denominations. In contrast, postage meter customers merely set their meters to the new rates. Postage-stamp customers stand in line at post offices, making it necessary to provide postal clerks to sell the stamps individually, while meter customers purchase postage in bulk. Indeed in many jurisdictions meter customers purchase postage electronically, so that no postal clerk is needed to handle the purchase.
For these and other reasons, some postal authorities offer discounts or special postal rates for mail satisfying certain conditions. A batch of mail pieces which are all of the same class of service, or which are sorted or bundled in a particular way, or which are sufficient in number to satisfy some count minimum, may qualify for a discount. Some such discounts may be provided for postage meter customers based on meter usage.
A typical embodiment for a discount procedure would take into account the usage per class or category. With this data a discount per customer may be calculated. The number of different mail classes or categories may be more than one hundred.
Historically in many jurisdictions, many discounts are obtained through physical submission of paperwork at the time of mailing. This is, of course, error-prone and awkward. Many postal authorities seek to shift as many processes as possible from manual and paper-based approaches to approaches that use electronic communications.
It will be appreciated that postal authorities wish to avoid giving discounts or rebates that exceed the discount or rebate to which the postal patron is entitled. In a paper-based system the postal authority is concerned, among other things, with the authenticity and accuracy of the information on the paper forms. In an electronic system the postal authority is likewise concerned with the authenticity and accuracy of the electronically communicated information. But those skilled in the art are well aware of instances in which seemingly secure systems, even systems administered by the military and government agencies, are penetrated by members of the general public. Security flaws are routinely uncovered from time to time in commonly used software and operating systems. A postal authority contemplating the establishment of a discount system employing electronically communicated information may well be apprehensive that some party might, through some tampering or other malfeasance, cause the postal authority to give a greater discount than that to which the party is entitled. Likewise it might be worried that one party might gain access to a discount to which some other party is entitled.
There is thus a great need for apparatus and method permitting a postal authority to capture data regarding discountable events such as batches of mail satisfying certain conditions, and to receive such data free of most concerns regarding its correctness and authenticity.
It will be appreciated that some postal customers purchase the services of mailing houses and other service providers. The mailing house may receive mail pieces from a customer and frank them (apply postage to them) and then pass them into the mail stream. In another approach, the mailing house may print and insert the mail pieces, and frank and mail them, so that the postal customer need not perform any of the steps but merely pays for the services as well as the postage. While it is the mailing house that has the direct relationship with the meter-setting service provider and with the postal authorities, depending on the terms of the discount it may be a discount to which the postal customer (and not the mailing house) is entitled.
Thus, an alternate scenario where postal statistics and data capture are becoming important is for third-party printing, where a postal security device (PSD) is used on different postage printing bases (PPBs) for different customers, or where several PSDs are used on the same PPB for different customers.
There is thus a great need for apparatus and method which permit a postal customer to purchase services from a mailing house, and yet which permit the batch activities of the individual postal customer to be securely reported to the postal authority so that appropriate discounts may be provided.
Prior-art approaches for handling batches of mail include those of U.S. Pat. No. 4,873,645 to Hunter et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,987,441 to Lee et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,019,991 to Sansone et al., and U.S. Pat. No. 4,888,803 to Pastor. None of these approaches is fully satisfactory in its handling of the problems and needs discussed here.